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How I ship projects at big tech companies
What I think about when I'm lead engineer on a project
Sean Goedecke
Sean Goedecke's personal blog
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Visit seangoedecke.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2020 – Nov 2026
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Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece of advice. I genuinely think…
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Good system design
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…
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Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases
What I've learned from ten years working on projects like this
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Everything I know about good API design
Most of what modern software engineers do involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from Twilio. I’ve spent a lot of time…
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How good engineers write bad code at big companies
Every couple of years somebody notices that large tech companies sometimes produce surprisingly sloppy code. If you haven’t worked at a big company, it might be…
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What is “good taste” in software engineering?
Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general…
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Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what…
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You can't design software you don't work on
Only the engineers who work on a large software system can meaningfully participate in the design process. That’s because you cannot do good software design…
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DeepSeek-V4-Flash means LLM steering is interesting again
Ever since Golden Gate Claude I’ve been fascinated with “steering”: the idea that you can guide LLM outputs by directly manipulating the activations of the…
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Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews
In the last two years, code review has gotten much more important. Code is now easy to generate using LLMs, but it’s still just as hard to review. Many software…
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Should LLMs just treat text content as an image?
Several days ago, DeepSeek released a new OCR paper. OCR, or “optical character recognition”, is the process of converting an image of text — say, a scanned…
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LLMs are not superhuman at reading and writing neural network weights
A recent paper argues that frontier LLMs can work with neural network weights directly. This seems superhuman, but it isn’t. The paper shows that GPT-6 Astra…
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Dangerous advice for software engineers
I’m a big fan of “sharp tools”. These are tools that are powerful enough to be hugely helpful or harmful, depending on how they’re used. Most forms of direct…
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Avoiding Worry Driven Development
Sofware dysfunction is more often motivated by worry than it is by a lack of technical skill
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Great software design looks underwhelming
Years ago I spent a lot of time reviewing coding challenges. The challenge itself was very straightforward — building a CLI tool that hit an API and allowed the…